2009
Bike Rides
Advisor: David Byrne, musician/artist/bicycle advocateSeptember 26, 2009, to January 3, 2010
Exhibition Reception: October 4, 2009
Bike Rides will explore the increasing relevance of bicycles in contemporary art and culture. As worldwide trends point to bike riding as a serious and sustainable means of transportation that is currently reshaping cities, the public’s fascination with bicycles is growing. Avid bike riders, amateur bike aficionados, recreational bikers, artists, cutting-edge designers, and the community at large are all reconsidering bicycles through their personal point of view: their own ideal bike. Bike Rides is a multidisciplinary exhibition that will feature customized bikes— bikes that have been re-appropriated by artists, enthusiasts, and designers to represent different identities and serve new and distinct functions. The works in the exhibition will range from Bicycles with Dreams of Cai Guo-Qiang to the sound system speaker-adorned Pimp My Piragua of Miguel Luciano to the latest customized bike of professional rider Lance Armstrong. The exhibition will also feature artworks by well-known international artists such as Tom Sachs and Guy Ben-Ner, in addition to emerging artists such as Jonathan Brand, Jarbas Lopes, and the collaborative FUTURE SHOCK. All these works emphasize the diverse use and function of bicycles that is present in different societies. The exhibition will include innovative and technologically advanced American customized bikes with examples from builders such as Trek, Seven Cycles, and Parlee Cycles.
Image: Jarbas Lopes, One bike from AERIALBIKEWAY series,
2001-2007
Ted Victoria: INFESTATION
Main Street Sculpture Project
October 31, 2009, to November 29, 2009
Exhibition Reception: October 31, 2009
Ted Victoria is well known for haunting works that use projected light to create animated illusions of reality. Referencing the early history of projected images, such as shadow plays and magic lanterns, his installations have an aura of uncanny believability that is an antidote to the slick overproduction found in much contemporary film and video. Utilizing lenses and homemade projectors, Victoria creates unforgettable images that are inseparable from his modest and low-tech means of production. For the Museum’s Main Street Sculpture Project, Victoria will be transforming the entire front section of The Aldrich’s 200-year-old administration building into an illusionary aquarium. Every night at dusk, the building, from first floor to attic, will seem to be filled with huge, swimming, live brine shrimp, projected on the inside of each window. The project will premiere on Halloween night when Ridgefield’s Main Street comes alive with thousands of costumed children and adults.
Image: Ted Victoria, rendering for Aldrich installation, 2009
Jeanne Finley and John Muse: The Slow Lapse of Days and Months
January 13 to June 2010
Exhibition Reception:
The Slow Lapse of Days and Months is a site-specific video installation by the collaborative team of Jeanne Finley and John Muse. Utilizing multi-screen video projections, the exhibition explores three profoundly different ways of keeping time, using the real working lives of three contemporary Ridgefield residents: a dog groomer, an arborist, and a guitar instructor, played off the lives of two local historical figures: a hermit from the eighteenth century named Sarah Bishop and a wandering vagrant from the nineteenth century known as ”the Leatherman.“ Finley and Muse have worked together since 1991. This will be their first major project in the northeast.
Image: Jeanne Finley and John Muse, The Vagabond Planetarium, 2008
Jo Yarrington: Ocular Visions
January 16 to June 2010
Exhibition Reception:
Connecticut artist Jo Yarrington will transform the Museum’s Leir Atrium to replicate a human eye by installing floor-to-ceiling, full-color transparencies of photographs taken of the inside of her eye. Yarrington will also utilize the Museum’s only permanent fixture, the camera obscura, for the optical project.
Image: Jo Yarrington, rendering for Aldrich installation, 2008
Paying a Visit to Mary: 2008 Hall Curatorial Fellowship Exhibition
January 31 to June 6, 2010
Exhibition Reception:
Paying a Visit to Mary comprises work by both emerging and more established artists in a broad range of media, including performance, film, painting, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition explores a significant subject in current artistic practice: personal narrative and contemporary storytelling. Constructed as a ”call and response“ between different voices, Paying a Visit to Mary forms a romantic, conceptual, and highly specific story of our time and our present human condition. The exhibition is seen as a conversation amongst the participants and the audience.The exhibition will be curated by the Canadian curator Maxine Kopsa, a resident of the Netherlands, who is the second recipient of the Hall Curatorial Fellowship.
Publication Available
Image: Emily Wardill, Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, 2007
Tom Molloy: New Work
January 31 to June 2010
Exhibition Reception:
Tom Molloy is an Irish artist whose work engages with global events, particularly America’s place in the new world order. With economical means, the artist manipulates found materials and images to explore the multivalency of symbols. With surgical precision, Molloy operates on potent emblems to excise hidden motives and overlooked correspondences that resonate through recent history. This exhibition will include sculptures, drawings, and photographs created by the artist during the last five years, as well as a new work made especially for The Aldrich Museum’s camera obscura. The exhibition is curated by Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator and critic in New York.
Image: Tom Molloy, Map, 2004
